Who hasn’t heard it: as one door closes another opens. When something which appears to be bad luck happens we need to look and see what other opportunities are there for us and simply move on. For me it is the end of my crowd-funding attempts to raise additional money for my small publishing and book-selling business. The crowd-funding door has closed after a full sixty days with only a very small portion of the hoped for additional funding being raised to bring my dream to reality. Whether I will ever take the same route or not remains to be seen; I now understand the process and also the drawbacks of such a scheme and have learned a good deal about those who are true Friends and those who are merely ticked as friends.

I was a little bit disturbed by the site I had chosen at the end of my time there. The site has an Ending Soon section, and my donation attempt didn’t make it to this page whilst others with considerably more time still to go, and a much higher return rate, did. I saw Ending Soon campaigns listed with nearly a full year still to run alongside those with just a few days left. The reason, I was told, is that there is a complicated algorithm used to decide what is worth promoting and what simply disappears. This algorithm is slanted towards more successful campaigns, ones which make the site appear more successful, and not simply to those campaigns nearing their end. If you have raised more money than anyone else you will appear on the Ending Soon page, and those in desperate need of support will not.

A sad state of affairs in my opinion. I would much rather have seen all campaigns nearing their end receiving the same last chance, but there is no arguing with software programming, with a company which is – and I can understand this to a certain extent – more interested in promoting those campaigns more likely to bring them further fees in.

We raised the final sum of one hundred twenty Euro from a wished for two thousand. Enough to cover the Internet costs and precious little else. Such is life. The extra needed will come from our own resources, in addition to the money we have already decided to invest, and the process will take a little bit longer than planned. But it will happen! Dreams are there to be realized.